In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to make a simple form to gather emails on your WordPress site and give those who sign up for the form a PDF from Dropbox. Optionally, you can have the site visitor added to your MailChimp list. This option turns the form from simple lead generation to list building, all in one.
This type of form is useful if, for example, you’re giving a talk at a conference and you want to share your slides with attendees and capture their email address. You can see an example fo how we did that for Christie’s talk at WordCamp Boston this year here.
Creating The Form
If you’re new to using Caldera Forms, you should probably start by reviewing our getting started guide on creating forms first. If not, go a head and make a new form using the blank form template. Add four fields to your form:
- First Name – A single line text field.
- Last Name – A single line text filed.
- Email – An email field.
- Download – A button field, of the submit type.
To make this form compact, I like to use two rows, each with two columns. Here is what it looks like in the form builder:
Setting Up The File Download
How To Find The Download Link For A Shared Dropbox File
In our case, we used Google Slides to create the presentation and downloaded them as a PDF. Once the PDF was downloaded, we uploaded them to dropbox and created a share link. If you open that link in the browser, it doesn’t download the file, it opens a PDF viewer. If you look in the URL bar, you’ll see that the end of the URL is &dl=0. If you change that 0 to a 1 and refresh the browser, the file will download. That’s the link we need!
Copy that link, with the 0 turned to a 1. And go back to Caldera Forms.
Using The Redirect Processor For File Downloads In Caldera Forms
By default, after a successful submission, Caldera Forms stays on the same page and shows a success message. That’s cool in most situations, but not helpful for this form. Luckily, Caldera Forms includes a redirect processor that we can use to change to another URL — IE the download link — after submission.
In the form editor, go to the Processors tab. Click the New Processor button and choose Redirect. In the URL setting enter the URL for your Dropbox download link.
Going Further
That’s all you need. Just click the Save button and add the Caldera Forms shortcode for your form to a page. But if you want to get the most out of this lead generation form, you should really add one of our email marketing add-ons. MailChimp is a great one to use, especially because you can use the built-in segmentation tools to create segment of subscribers from this one event to follow up with our add them to a related interest group.